Current understanding of higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs) is based primarily on crystalline materials. Here, we propose that HOTIs can be realized in quasicrystals. Specifically, we show that two distinct types of second-order topological insulators (SOTIs) can be constructed on the quasicrystalline lattices (QLs) with different tiling patterns. One is derived by using a Wilson mass term to gap out the edge states of the quantum spin Hall insulator on QLs. The other is the quasicrystalline quadrupole insulator (QI) with a quantized quadrupole moment. We reveal some unusual features of the corner states (CSs) in the quasicrystalline SOTIs. We also show that the quasicrystalline QI can be simulated by a designed electrical circuit, where the CSs can be identified by measuring the impedance resonance peak. Our findings not only extend the concept of HOTIs into quasicrystals but also provide a feasible way to detect the topological property of quasicrystals in experiments.

Cholesterol is a crucial component of mammalian cell membranes that takes part in many vital processes. It is generally accepted that cholesterol stabilizes the membrane and induces transitions into ordered states. In contrast to expectations, we demonstrate that cholesterol can destabilize the membrane by creating a nanodomain around a perpendicularly embedded ultrashort carbon nanotube (CNT), and we show that cholesterol triggers the translocation of an ultrashort CNT through the cell membrane. Using atomistic simulations, we report the existence of a nanoscale domain around an ultrashort carbon nanotube within a crossover distance of 0.9 nm from the surface of the nanotube, where the properties of the bilayer are different from the bulk: the domain is characterized by increased fluctuations, increased thickness, and increased order of the lipids with respect to the bulk. Cholesterol decreases the thickness and order of lipids and increases the fluctuations with respect to a pure lipid bilayer. Experimentally, we confirm that cholesterol nanodomains provoke spontaneous translocation of nanotubes through a lipid bilayer even for low membrane tensions. A specially designed microfluidic device allows us to trace the kinetic pathway of the translocation process and establish the threshold cholesterol concentration of 20% for translocation. The reported nanoscale cholesterol-induced membrane restructuring near the ultrashort CNT in lipid membranes enables precise control and specific targeting of a membrane using cholesterol. As an example, it may allow for specific targeting between cholesterol-rich mammalian cells and cholesterol-poor bacterial cells.

When a qubit or spin interacts with others under a many-body Hamiltonian, the information it contains progressively scrambles. Here, nuclear spins of an adamantane crystal are used as a quantum simulator to monitor such dynamics through out-of-time-order correlators, while a Loschmidt echo (LE) asses how weak perturbations degrade the information encoded in these increasingly complex states. Both observables involve the implementation of a time-reversal procedure which, in practice, involves inverting the sign of the effective Hamiltonian. Our protocols use periodic radio frequency pulses to modulate the natural dipolar interaction implementing a Hamiltonian that can be scaled down at will. Meanwhile, experimental errors and strength of perturbative terms remain constant and can be quantified through the LE. For each scaling factor, information spreading occurs with a timescale, $T_2$, inversely proportional to the local second moment of the Hamiltonian. We find that, when the reversible interactions dominate over the perturbations, the information scrambled among up to ${10}^2$ spins can still be recovered. However, we find that the LE decay rate cannot become smaller than a critical value $1/T_3\approx (0.15\pm 0.02)/T_2$, which only depends on the interactions themselves, and not on the perturbations. This result shows the emergence of a regime of intrinsic irreversibility in accordance to a central hypothesis of irreversibility, hinted from previous experiments.

By holographic duality, we identify a novel dynamical phase transition which results from the temperature dependence of nonequilibrium dynamics of dark solitons in a superfluid. For a nonequilibrium superfluid system with an initial density of dark solitons, there exists a critical temperature $T_d$, above which the system relaxes to equilibrium by producing sound waves, while below which it goes through an intermediate phase with a finite density of vortex-antivortex pairs. In particular, as $T_d$ is approached from below, the density of vortex pairs scales as $(T_d-T{)}^{\gamma }$ with the critical exponent $\gamma =1/2$.

Multitemperature models are nowadays often used to quantify the ultrafast electron-phonon (boson) relaxations and coupling strengths in advanced quantum solids. To test their applicability and limitations, we perform systematic studies of carrier relaxation dynamics in copper, a prototype system for which the two-temperature model (TTM) was initially considered. Using broadband time-resolved optical spectroscopy, we study the time evolution of the electron distribution function, $f(E)$, over a large range of excitation densities. Following intraband optical excitation, $f(E)$ is found to be athermal over several 100 fs, with a substantial part of the absorbed energy already being transferred to the lattice. We show, however, that the electron-phonon coupling constant can still be obtained using the TTM analysis, provided that the data are analyzed over the time window where the electrons are already quasithermal, and the electronic temperature is determined experimentally.

Bell inequalities constitute a key tool in quantum information theory: they not only allow one to reveal nonlocality in composite quantum systems, but, more importantly, they can be used to certify relevant properties thereof. We provide a general construction of Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by the multiqubit graph states and can be used for their robust self-testing. Apart from their theoretical relevance, our inequalities offer two main advantages from an experimental viewpoint: (i) they present a significant reduction of the experimental effort needed to violate them, as the number of correlations they contain scales only linearly with the number of observers; (ii) numerical results indicate that the self-testing statements for graph states derived from our inequalities tolerate noise levels that are met by present experimental data. We also discuss possible generalizations of our approach to entangled states whose stabilizers are not tensor products of Pauli matrices. Our work introduces a promising approach for the certification of complex many-body quantum states.

Quantum error correction is expected to be essential in large-scale quantum technologies. However, the substantial overhead of qubits it requires is thought to greatly limit its utility in smaller, near-term devices. Here we introduce a new family of special-purpose quantum error-correcting codes that offer an exponential reduction in overhead compared to the usual repetition code. They are tailored for a common and important source of decoherence in current experiments, whereby a register of qubits is subject to phase noise through coupling to a common fluctuator, such as a resonator or a spin defect. The smallest instance encodes one logical qubit into two physical qubits, and corrects decoherence to leading-order using a constant number of one- and two-qubit operations. More generally, while the repetition code on $n$ qubits corrects errors to order $t^{O(n)}$, with $t$ the time between recoveries, our codes correct to order $t^{O(2^n)}$. Moreover, they are robust to model imperfections in small- and intermediate-scale devices, where they already provide substantial gains in error suppression. As a result, these hardware-efficient codes open a potential avenue for useful quantum error correction in near-term, pre-fault tolerant devices.

As a two-dimensional entity, FeSe has been widely explored to harbor high transition temperature (high-$T_c$) superconductivity in diverse physical settings; yet to date, the underlying superconducting mechanisms are still under active debate. Here we use first-principles approaches to identify a chemically different yet structurally identical counterpart of FeSe, namely, monolayered CoSb, which is shown to be an attractive candidate to harbor high-$T_c$ superconductivity as well. We first show that a freestanding CoSb monolayer can adopt the FeSe-like layered structure, even though its known bulk phase has no resemblance to layering. Next, we demonstrate that such a CoSb monolayer possesses superconducting properties comparable with or superior to FeSe, a striking finding that can be attributed to the isovalency nature of the two systems. More importantly, the layered CoSb structure can be stabilized on ${\mathrm{SrTiO}}_3(001)$, offering appealing alternative platforms for realizing high-$T_c$ superconductivity beyond the well-established Cu- and Fe-based superconducting families. $\mathrm{CoSb}/{\mathrm{SrTiO}}_3(001)$ also exhibits distinctly different magnetic properties from $\mathrm{FeSe}/{\mathrm{SrTiO}}_3(001)$, which should provide a crucial new angle to elucidate the microscopic mechanisms of superconductivity in these and related systems.

Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) offers the prospect of distributing secret keys with only minimal security assumptions, by making use of a Bell violation. However, existing DIQKD security proofs have low noise tolerances, making a proof-of-principle demonstration currently infeasible. We investigate whether the noise tolerance can be improved by using advantage distillation, which refers to using two-way communication instead of the one-way error correction currently used in DIQKD security proofs. We derive an efficiently verifiable condition to certify that advantage distillation is secure against collective attacks in a variety of DIQKD scenarios, and use this to show that it can indeed allow higher noise tolerances, which could help to pave the way towards an experimental implementation of DIQKD.

Artificial neural networks were recently shown to be an efficient representation of highly entangled many-body quantum states. In practical applications, neural-network states inherit numerical schemes used in variational Monte Carlo method, most notably the use of Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to estimate quantum expectations. The local stochastic sampling in MCMC caps the potential advantages of neural networks in two ways: (i) Its intrinsic computational cost sets stringent practical limits on the width and depth of the networks, and therefore limits their expressive capacity; (ii) its difficulty in generating precise and uncorrelated samples can result in estimations of observables that are very far from their true value. Inspired by the state-of-the-art generative models used in machine learning, we propose a specialized neural-network architecture that supports efficient and exact sampling, completely circumventing the need for Markov-chain sampling. We demonstrate our approach for two-dimensional interacting spin models, showcasing the ability to obtain accurate results on larger system sizes than those currently accessible to neural-network quantum states.

In the QCD axion dark matter scenario with postinflationary Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking, the number density of axions, and hence the dark matter density, depends on the length of string per unit volume at cosmic time $t$, by convention written $\zeta /t^2$. The expectation has been that the dimensionless parameter $\zeta$ tends to a constant ${\zeta }_0$, a feature of a string network known as scaling. It has recently been claimed that in larger numerical simulations $\zeta$ shows a logarithmic increase with time, while theoretical modeling suggests an inverse logarithmic correction. Either case would result in a large enhancement of the string density at the QCD transition, and a substantial revision to the axion mass required for the axion to constitute all of the dark matter. With a set of new simulations of global strings, we compare the standard scaling (constant-$\zeta$) model to the logarithmic growth and inverse-logarithmic correction models. In the standard scaling model, by fitting to linear growth in the mean string separation $\xi =t/\sqrt{\zeta }$, we find ${\zeta }_0=1.19\pm 0.20$. We conclude that the apparent corrections to $\zeta$ are artifacts of the initial conditions, rather than a property of the scaling network. The residuals from the constant-$\zeta$ (linear $\xi$) fit also show no evidence for logarithmic growth, restoring confidence that numerical simulations can be simply extrapolated from the Peccei-Quinn symmetry-breaking scale to the QCD scale. Reanalysis of previous work on the axion number density suggests that recent estimates of the axion dark matter mass in the postinflationary symmetry-breaking scenario we study should be increased by about 50%.

The ${}^7\mathrm{H}$ system was populated in the ${}^2\mathrm{H}({}^8\mathrm{He},{}^3\mathrm{He}){}^7\mathrm{H}$ reaction with a 26 AMeV ${}^8\mathrm{He}$ beam. The ${}^7\mathrm{H}$ missing mass energy spectrum, the ${}^3\mathrm{H}$ energy and angular distributions in the ${}^7\mathrm{H}$ decay frame were reconstructed. The ${}^7\mathrm{H}$ missing mass spectrum shows a peak, which can be interpreted either as unresolved $5/2^{+}$ and $3/2^{+}$ doublet or one of these states at 6.5(5) MeV. The data also provide indications of the $1/2^{+}$ ground state of ${}^7\mathrm{H}$ located at 1.8(5) MeV with quite a low population cross section of $\sim 25\mu \mathrm{b}/\mathrm{sr}$ within angular range ${\theta }_{\mathrm{c}.\mathrm{m}.}\simeq (17°–27°)$.

Exploring the properties and applications of topological quantum states is essential to better understand topological matter. Here, we theoretically study a quasi-one-dimensional topological atom array. In the low-energy regime, the atom array is equivalent to a topological superatom. Driving the superatom in a cavity, we study the interaction between light and topological quantum states. We find that the edge states exhibit topology-protected quantum coherence, which can be characterized from the photon transmission. This quantum coherence helps us to find a superradiance-subradiance transition, and we also study its finite-size scaling behavior. The superradiance-subradiance transition also exists in symmetry-breaking systems. More importantly, it is shown that the quantum coherence of the subradiant edge state is robust to random noises, allowing the superatom to work as a topologically protected quantum memory. We suggest a relevant experiment with three-dimensional circuit QED. Our study may have applications in quantum computation and quantum optics based on topological edge states.

The spatial, temporal, and spectral information in optical imaging play a crucial role in exploring the unknown world and unencrypting natural mysteries. However, the existing optical imaging techniques can only acquire the spatiotemporal or spatiospectral information of the object with the single-shot method. Here, we develop a hyperspectrally compressed ultrafast photography (HCUP) that can simultaneously record the spatial, temporal, and spectral information of the object. In our HCUP, the spatial resolution is $1.26\mathrm{lp}/\mathrm{mm}$ in the horizontal direction and $1.41\mathrm{lp}/\mathrm{mm}$ in the vertical direction, the temporal frame interval is 2 ps, and the spectral frame interval is 1.72 nm. Moreover, HCUP operates with receive-only and single-shot modes, and therefore it overcomes the technical limitation of active illumination and can measure the nonrepetitive or irreversible transient events. Using our HCUP, we successfully measure the spatiotemporal-spatiospectral intensity evolution of the chirped picosecond laser pulse and the photoluminescence dynamics. This Letter extends the optical imaging from three- to four-dimensional information, which has an important scientific significance in both fundamental research and applied science.

Self-similar structures occur naturally and have been employed to engineer exotic physical properties. We show that acoustic modes of a fractal-like system of tensioned strings can display increased mechanical quality factors due to the enhancement of dissipation dilution. We describe a realistic resonator design in which the quality factor of the fundamental mode is enhanced by as much as 2 orders of magnitude compared to a simple string with the same size and tension. Our findings can open new avenues in force sensing, cavity quantum optomechanics, and experiments with suspended test masses.